The family of Viktor Kudryavtsev, accused of high treason, who died after a pre-trial detention center, will continue to prove his innocence in court

The family of scientist Viktor Kudryavtsev, against whom a treason case was initiated (Article 275 of the Criminal Code), insisted on holding the trial posthumously over him. How informs “Novaya Gazeta” with reference to the press secretary of the lawyer Ivan Pavlov Elizaveta Aleksandrova-Zorina, the scientist’s relatives will seek to plead his innocence in court.

Viktor Kudryavtsev died in April of this year at the age of 77. He spent a year and two months in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center. His interests are represented by lawyers of the First Division project Ivan Pavlov and Yevgeny Smirnov, as well as defense lawyer Petr Zaikin.

“The death of the accused is usually a pretext for dismissing the case. But the relatives do not agree with such a turn and want to bring the case to court. Now an investigation is underway, which was supposed to end before the New Year, in any case, as he promised the lawyers [следователь] Alexander Chaban, but it’s not over yet, ”Pavlov said.

“He [Кудрявцев] fought and did not give up to the last, and I am glad that his family does not give up either and is fighting for his honest name, ”the lawyer emphasized.

TsNIIMash employee Viktor Kudryavtsev was arrested in July 2018. According to the investigation, he sent classified data to the Von Karman Institute of Hydrodynamics (Belgium), which is a NATO research center, with which TsNIIMash was implementing the FP7-Space joint project. The investigation used a letter from Kudryavtsev’s mail about the green card as one of the grounds for imprisonment in a pre-trial detention center. The defense called this message ordinary spam.

Kudryavtsev did not admit his guilt. The physicist had no access to secret information for more than 20 years, and the FP7-SPACE program itself was approved at the government level and reports on it were published in the public domain.

In September 2019, Kudryavtsev was released from the pre-trial detention center on recognizance not to leave.

“A year and two months in Lefortovo on an absurd charge completely undermined his health. The Kudryavtsev case is an example of how the special services are killing Russian science. In the truest sense of the word, ”wrote Ivan Pavlov in connection with the death of the scientist.